Join us every week for a trip into the weird and wonderful world of trailers. Whether it’s the first teaser for the latest installment in your favourite franchise, an obscure preview for a strange indie darling, whether it’s good, bad, ugly or just plain weird – your favourite pop culture baristas are there to tell you what they think.
Eric: I’ll admit I’ve never seen Adventure Time. This show may make me never want to, or alternatively make me seek it out as soon as the end of it coruscates across my retinas. Featuring a guy named Clancy who visits multiple alternate apocalyptic versions of Earth by sticking his head in a VR womb (can you see where this is going?*), the show’s conceit is that it’s actually a series of podcasts that Pendleton Ward animated into stories featuring visuals that are either beautiful, disgusting, or more frequently, both.
Keeping with the visual trippiness, the first episode is a discussion with a doctor (who is also an adorably teensy President of the United States, if you’re paying attention to the animation) on whether drugs are good or bad. The hook is that they’re discussing it while dispatching zombies in and around the White House. It’s bizarre, and by any metric this approach should not work — but then you find its rambling cadence leads to a pocket of profundity by borrowing from Buddhism to subvert the idea of a zombie apocalypse. Like any drug, The Midnight Gospel isn’t good or bad, it just depends on the frame of mind with which you approach it.
*I couldn’t either.
Julie: From Jack Thorne (His Dark Materials) and Damien Chazelle (of Whiplash fame), The Eddy is about a jazz club in Paris. And if it is well done, I tend to love this sort of thing. The music, the atmosphere, the characters. And this one looks smashingly well-produced. I’ll sure give it a try.
Matt: I have to admit, I never read any H.P. Lovecraft. I was interested, sure, but by the time I got around to it, I’d heard so much about poor Howard Phillips’ hangups, in particular about people less, well, white than him, and I felt I didn’t really need that sort of racism in my literary diet. Most adaptations I’m aware of go for the tentacley bits, the madness and Elder Gods, while leaving out the more unsavoury aspects – but HBO’s forthcoming Lovecraft Country, not least due to Jordan Peele’s involvement, looks like it may not just remember that side of Lovecraft but do interesting things with it.
A Damn Fine Cup of Culture 